North American Aviation AJ-1 "Savage" Hydraulic Strut Bendix p/n 160748

Description: Bendix Hydraulic Strut for NAA AJ-1 Savage One used and weathered hydraulic strut for the North American Aviation built AJ-1 Savage of Korean War vintage as built by Bendix. Just exactly WHAT the strut is I am not sure as I lack the -4 manual for the aircraft type... but I have a strong suspicion this was a wing fold strut. This one has a Bendix p/n on it of 160748 and serial no. of BO 605 R. The housing end has p/n 157 537 cast on it. Looks as if this one was carefully removed from the scrapped airframe. The proper mounting bolt is still there. Metal data plate as safety wired to the upper portion of the strut is an admonishment for servicing. It instructs personnel how to let the air charge out of strut. This is one very unusual survivor of one of Arizona's lesser known scrapping operations of the late 1950s. Obsolete USN aircraft were stored wingtip to wingtip outside of Phoenix at Litchfield NAF, Goodyear, AZ. The facility held just about everything in the Naval inventory from WWII through the mid-1950s. Once the aircraft was determined obsolete and no longer needed, Navy had policy of offering aircraft for sale or turning them into scrap. Litchfield a a little slice of heaven back in those days - full of N3N-3s, SNJs, TBMs, F4, F6F, FG, JD-1, PV-1 and -2, Privateers, PBWs... and this was just a short list of the prop stuff. There were rows upon rows of Grumman Panthers and Cougars and North American Aviation FJ Furies. And then there was the lot of retired AJ-1 Savages... The AJ was an odd amalgam of piston powered technology coupled with jet propulsion that made it something of a manufacturing oddity. Conceived at the end of WWII, the Navy decided it could make use of a medium patrol bomber capable of landing on an aircraft carrier capable of handling a nuclear payload. And with this concept, North American Aviation came to the rescue. True to form, it was built to Navy specs - the AJ was designed for carrier duty and had a most-cumbersome system of folding wings and tail surface. From Wikipedia with photo credit to USN: The AJ-1 was a three-seat, high-wing monoplane with tricycle landing gear. To facilitate carrier operations, the outer wing panels and the tailfin could be manually folded.[3] It was fitted with two 2,300-brake-horsepower (1,700 kW) Pratt & Whitney R-2800-44W Double Wasp piston engines, mounted in nacelles under each wing with a large turbocharger fitted inside each engine nacelle, and a 4,600-pound-force (20,000 N) Allison J33-A-10 turbojet was fitted in the rear fuselage.[4] Total production run of the Savage was 140 airframes and three prototypes. The Navy struggled with the AJ-1 and many were converted to photo-recon variants. I suspect many if not all of the photo-recon ships were quietly cut up at Litchfield. Most of the Navy's surplus prop trainers, fighters and even bombers that arrived at NAS Litchfield were scrapped here in the mid to late 1950s. By the time the facility formally closed in the mid 1960s, they were all gone. The fate of these retract strut illustrates the scrapping process. Once doomed to the scrapper's row, the airframes had engines, props, avionics, radio and radar systems, turrets, and other parts removed. Smaller parts like these hydraulic components and landing gear and armor plate was further stripped from the raw airframes to reduce the amount of steel scrap headed to the furnace. The airframes were then rendered down further with oxy-acetylene torches or a guillotine blade and fed into the furnace. The end result was aluminum ingots and piles of removed components. The removed components were typically sorted by type and then sold to scrap purveyors in lot sales. Items like hydraulic struts, small motors and hydraulic components found limited buyers in the surplus sale markets. The surplus was cheap and plentiful, and periodically had limited adaptations and buyers in the civilian market. This strut was literally "whistler wrench" cut from the AJ-1s there on scrapper's row. The strut then went on to languish in not one but two scrap yards in the Phoenix area for the next 65 years. It appears most of these that we found were unbolted and oddly the main attach bolts were left on the strut. For a strut that been out in the elements for better part of five decades, it's faired pretty well. The steel housing was originally cad plated, and sometimes during Naval service the strut caught overpaint with Navy Blue Drab. There's a few flecks of blue drab paint on this one. The cad plating shows a rust patina. No damage to steel strut casting. What's interesting is that this strut had a very light light nitrogen charge to it when found, ergo the extended position. Chrome is nice and bright with no drop damage or delamination to the chrome. The steel packing gland nut is still in good shape and doesn't show any mars from improper tool use. We cleaned the packing nut off a little with a wire brush, as on many of the struts we saved the internal oil had leaked over decades in the heat and further collected dust and dirt and grime. Condition of packing seals is unknown, but although purged now it did hold a light nitrogen charge. Is this a rebuildable core? Possibly so. As with anything aero related of this vintage it has to been taken apart, inspected, and reviewed for serviceability. Given it had no other use other than military, it has potential for re-use off some sort, but it probably best illustrates the ill-fated Savage. There's only ONE sole survivor of the type left today (Naval display, Pensacola) so you'd be most ambitious to incorporate it into a restoration project. All ends capped and plugged to keep out dust and moisture. No odd or improper wrench marks on the gland nuts. Still safety wired together. Chrome looks good. This one still had a very light nitrogen charged which was purged when we pressed the Schraeder valve. About 18 pounds of raw strut itself. What you see in the photo series is exactly what you get. Ships cheapest via FedEx Ground, I'd imagine. Questions? Please ask seller. And thanks for looking!

Price: 19.5 USD

Location: Mesa, Arizona

End Time: 2024-11-04T23:02:00.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD